Remembering 25th November, 1999

The flower withers, but the seed remains.   

(Kahlil Gibran)

Remembrance

November seems to be the month for media remembrance.  This month we have been revisiting film of violent events.  30 years since the murder of John Lennon, 47 years since the assassination of John Kennedy, 15 years since the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin.  In November we also commemorate Remembrance Day.

For me, November brings back memories of my first visit to the USA.   One month after that visit John Kennedy was killed.   Three months after my second visit to the USA in 2001, 3000 people were killed in the Twin Towers.

However, we should also commemorate in November the flowering of one man's far-sighted vision for a collaborative, interactive and peaceful world.  20 years ago Tim Berners-Lee published a formal proposal for the World Wide Web.

The House that Dennis kept

High up in a Greenwich home

a chorus of birds brings dawn to my room.

High up in a Spitalfields attic, no birds sing.

Nothing disturbs the silence of death and decay,

not even the woman, whose face at the window

gazes down through the gas-light below.

A lonely canary is still being fed

though there’s nobody there in the house,

only whispers, reflections and clocks ticking on,

meals left half-eaten, warm fires and a cat

and someone who seems to be just out of sight.

Will she step from the shadows and speak
of the Huguenot weavers?

How they lived in the cellar and toiled full of hope

down the years.

How their status advanced as fortunes improved,

and in rooms richly-furnished and warm,

they rose up the floors

with the years.

 

Until wealth dwindled slowly, poverty neared

rooms lost their comfort and cheer,

and there in the attic the family perished.

As all turned to dust

with the years.

94 years in all.

So many lives to recall.

But nothing is certain in this house full of past,

where time seems to fracture and fray.

A woman’s life may be shaped and re-cast,

as a ghost that intrudes on today,

or fate might decree that she not live at all.

Was there only a house, with no movement, no talk,

no woman observing, no one out on a walk?

Just a woman ‘s profile on a window up high

a cut-out of cardboard?

or a face that won’t die?

How to sunburn a cow

I've been attending a U3A course exploring ideas about time.  In discussing the introduction of daylight savings (summer) time across Australia David gave the example of an opponent of this change (a Queensland farmer) who thought that the extra hours of sunlight  would 'sunburn his cows'.

Last year I spent time in Greenwich, London and visited the Royal Observatory.  I remember standing on the Meridian line, after finding Hobart marked out, and then discovering that nearby schoolchildren had no idea where Hobart was.  However, the children knew my friend and I were obviously Australian, because they thought we sounded just like the stars of 'Neighbors'.

As I spent a lot of time thinking about time in Greenwich (including reading a book by a scientist, who argued that time did not exist) I have been very interested in David Leaman's course.  It has also reminded me of my visit to an amazing house Spitalfields in London, where Dennis created a home that seems to be still occupied by the original Huguenot owners.  It's an unusual tourist attraction.(http://dennissevershouse.co.uk/)

Paperless Office?

Is there a convergence of ideas whose time has come?  John Quiggin (http://johnquiggin.com/) recently asserted that the paperless office is closer than we commonly believe.  The purchase and use of e-readers and e-books in Australia seems to have really taken off this year and every day, as we spend more and more time in social networking, information gathering, communication and artistic expression using screen-based activities, the need for paper is lessened.  Perhaps our literary-based culture is in the process of transforming into a visually-based one.  As we digitise everything we can for easy on-line access we create an on-line world that is multi-faceted: on the one hand personalised, immediate and accessible, on the other hand   universal, omnipresent, and inter-active, but  in either case a world  framed in ways that use much less paper.   This week in Tasmania we are finally reaching a peace settlement in the 30 year battle of the forests.  Wouldn't  it be ironic to reach this point only to find that the market for paper products is decreasing with every day that passes?